


nadir

by captainofthegreenpeas



Category: The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Heartbreak, Heavensdew, Separation, movie!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 17:37:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13839711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainofthegreenpeas/pseuds/captainofthegreenpeas
Summary: With Katniss believed dead and Fulvia and the prep team missing, Plutarch despairs.





	nadir

Katniss could never be trained to recite her lines, but Coin could. Her voice was thick with emotion, yet it retained the sharp clarity to strike every note she wanted it to.

  
He himself was out of shot, just. It was a strange feeling, but he was used to it. Coin had been left to do the talking. Nobody in Panem would want to hear what a Gamemaker had to say about the death of a former tribute. Especially since the Quarter Quell.

  
Besides, Coin was the leader. There was no point in putting a backseat driver in the spotlight.

  
The red button signalling ON AIR went dark, announcing the end of the broadcast. Coin rose to her feet and left the room without a word. It was just over a minute until Plutarch was ready to do the same. He placed his hands on the table and used them to push himself to his feet. He felt twice as heavy as usual. Leaning against the table as he did so, he made his way out of the room.

  
People were still milling outside, talking fervently. He heard disbelief, anger, genuine sorrow.

  
The sounds quietened as his presence spread across the gathering. They stared at him. He stared at no one.

  
 _You know how to walk, fool_ , he told himself. One foot in front of the other. He did not need to carve himself a path. They stepped out of the way, still staring. 

  
He did not know for how long he walked, but you never do when you’re in the haze of dreaming.

  
The corridor he found himself in was narrow and empty. Somewhere near the Education Centre.

  
Something about it pressed at his knees and he reached for the wall as he slid down to the ground and finally collapsed.

  
“All of them?” was all that he had said when they watched the building consumed by fire and then, itself: “a-all of them?”

  
All of them, the Capitol boasted.

  
He found himself remembering the way that the arena had crashed in the Quarter Quell. Seeing it destroyed was like nothing he had ever seen before, in colour, in sound or in sheer force. He remembered the sight of the victors helpless far below. The way that the claw had dropped down and closed around Katniss like a hand lifting up a little wounded bird. Carrying her out of the danger he had put her in. Coin had been incensed by his defiance, at the choice he had made: Katniss over Peeta.

  
 _Now we have neither. We rescued Katniss, then we rescued Finnick, then Peeta, later. Then we lost them all in seconds. And the Hawthorne warrior. And the soldiers who had saluted him and called him Commander Gamebreaker. And the cameramen, Cressida’s brothers-in-arms. Cressida._ He tried to imagine Cressida dead, but it was not possible. In his mind she was still the little chatterbox with the crooked teeth and the neon green pigtails who showed him her screenplays and who treated him more like a father than she did her own.

  
 _Destruction is all that I am good for_ , he thought. _Every time I try anything different, it all dies._

  
“Y'know what you need to do,” he had been advised once by another Gamemaker. “Y'need to take… take your heart an’ and make it like, y'know, a little rock.”

 

The Gamemaker had made a fist. He had been stone drunk, but that was the only time you could trust a Gamemaker to tell you the truth. It had happened not long after Plutarch’s first games.

 

“Nothing hurts a rock, does it? And then, you do fine. Just… don’t let any of it get to you. Don’t get attached to the kids you’re watching over and it’s all easy. ‘Cause rocks don’t break.”

 

The Gamemaker had then passed out and landed uncomfortably in Plutarch’s lap.

  
 _You’re wrong_ , Plutarch thought now. _You were wrong about a lot, including that. You forgot what happens to stone. Stone crumbles. When something breaks, you’re left with pieces. Stone leaves only dust. What can I do with dust?_

  
He might not have long to wonder. Snow might still win. In the wake of the loss of Katniss, the waverers might resurface. Those whom the Capitol had enslaved, but who had never imagined a world without them. For whom, the new Panem they had promised was a world of ifs and maybes.

They needed certainty. Snow offered certainty. If the rebels couldn’t keep Katniss safe, who could keep them safe, if all they had to do was beg him to protect them? If they resurfaced while troops were obliterated by pod after pod, the rebels could face mutiny. No one wanted their sons, their daughters, their neighbours butchered in ways that even sickened Gamemakers. Retreat from the Capitol would give Snow time. Time to regroup and retake. The Career Districts could redeclare for the Capitol, aware of what could happen to one of their own, even a favourite (and what was Finnick but a favourite?). Snow might even promise mercy,  better living conditions than before, promise that all he had wanted in the first place was Katniss dead and order restored. And with Katniss dead, all he needed was for them to submit. 

 

  
That would be just like Snow, to be the winner in the end. Plutarch had seen it all before. Sooner or later, Snow would always get what he wanted. Plutarch had scoured the histories of the last uprising, looking for every single mistake. The worst had been the mountains. The rebels had gone to the mountains of the Capitol, expecting victory to be there. They had found only death.

  
_After all the lives that I have spent, after all of myself that I have given, must it now be taken from me? I was so close. I could not bear it. For every two steps forward there had been a step back. It is as if I fight all night for a drink of water, only for the rising sun to dry it all away._

 

  
Plutarch would have been angry, but anger needed strength and he was so tired. He had not felt so weary since the night his father had died. Horror and pain were no match for loss. Without something of value, you could not feel loss.

 _What have I had that has not been lost?_ All of his material possessions were left in the Capitol, of course, but for the precious contents of his pockets. That loss he had shouldered easily enough. It was his, but at the end of the day, it was still stuff. His parents had died long enough ago that their loss was one he was accustomed to. The people who surrounded his daily life for years were also gone, but he was hardly surprised that he didn’t miss Seneca Crane. As for Fulvia…  he had managed better than expected. Yet he still woke in the middle of the night thinking she was near, thinking that was her voice he heard or her arms he felt. _Fulvia must be dead_ , he thought. 

 

If she was alive, if her or any of the prep team were still alive, they would have found rebels who could send word to Thirteen. Communications were up across the country, silence held only one answer. They must be dead. There had been no trace of them, alive or dead, in the Tribute Center and judging by the citizen’s database Beetee had hacked, the Capitol genuinely thought they were in Thirteen. The only place they could still be hiding undetected- if, if if if they were still alive, was in the Capitol. A city filled with traps at every street corner. If they left their hiding place to get food, or to flee, a foot wrong would end everything. They would starve in their little concrete island surrounded by sharks they could not see but whose teeth they dreaded the bite of. 

 

  
 _I will never see her again._ He had never believed in any kind of afterlife, just as he had never believed in any kind of god. Death was it. And the dead watched over nobody. Fulvia did not know what was happening and never would. She could not speak from beyond wherever her unmarked grave was. She could never console him, or advise him or even weep for him. _I am alone again, but this time unwillingly_. And her loss, her dear loss, her costly loss had accomplished nothing. The prep team were gone too. 

 

  
 _Cinna trusted me to rescue them._ They were innocent people, but then innocent people made the quickest corpses. At least Cinna didn’t know he had failed. But it was enough that Plutarch did.

  
The worst thing was not that they were all, all of them, every one dead, pieces in his games, but that they had slipped from his hands and fallen as he moved them across the board. 

  
 _Katniss was my pawn, but she became what every pawn becomes when it crosses from one side of the board to the other. A queen._ Coin might still become the President of Panem, but to the Districts, Katniss was always the queen. A queen once lost cannot be replaced.

  
That thought hauled him back to his feet and his feet hauled him back to Command. He regretted the decision upon arrival and wanted to run, if he could still run, back to the empty corridor to keep away from the faces of Effie and Haymitch and Beetee and just hope he didn’t bump into Annie or either of the Everdeens. Or anyone. At all. Ever again.

  
Beetee’s eyes were red and sore, but he remained at his desk. In one hand he held a long communication wire connected to a communicuff. The fingers of the other tapped away, trying to turn the crackling from the wire into something intelligible. Finally words started to buzz into Beetee’s ear.

  
“Plutarch,” he said, handing it to him. “It’s for you.”


End file.
